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Has you may have noticed. WP-Buddy.com has relaunched with a new (homemade) WordPress theme based on the popular _s starter theme. So why have I switched to a self-made theme instead of using a free or paid theme? Continue reading →

I’ve just got a support question for my Countdown WordPress Plugin which was written only for WooCommerce to use their internal schedule functionality. A guy complaint about a problem that the plugin always shows a warning message that tells him that WooCommerce is not installed. It turned out that he had installed my plugin on a multisite WordPress site where WooCommerce was installed site wide but my plugin was not. So the question was: How can I check if a plugin is site wide or network active? Continue reading →

Rich Snippets are around for quite some time now and it’s time to reveal the current status. What are Rich Snippets, how does it work and how can you integrate Rich Snippets into WordPress? The answers can be found in this blog post. Continue reading →

The Google Search Engine is one of the most advanced search engines in the world. And of course, it’s free of charge because Google earns an unbelievable amount of money just by selling ads on its search engine platform as well as on other websites (display ads), too. For us the Google Custom Search Engine is perfect to integrate in WordPress because a) WordPress is one of the most popular blogCMS in the world and b) it has a bad search engine integrated into it. So it’s time to replace it anyway. Plus: Most of us earn money with websites (maybe through niche sites). Therefore it’s nice to have another income stream by using the free version of Google’s Custom Search because it allows us to link it with Google Adsense. What you can expect from this article is the following: Continue reading →

this is just a short shout-out to the users who bought one of our products directly via ClickBank or CodeCanyon.

You’re now able to log-in into wp-buddy.com using your purchase code + username (or in case of ClickBank your E-Mail address) that you’ve used to buy one of our products. Just use the My Account link on the top right of every page.

Currently I’ve found a nice video about Rich Snippets. This is very interesting because I do really deal with Rich Snippets for a few month now. And as you may know I’ve some great Rich Snippets Plugins to sell on this website as well. Continue reading →

Haven’t even heard about Schema.org?

Schema.org is out there since June 2011. It was launched by Google, Bing and Yahoo to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. The purpose is to add microdata to HTML elements to provide more information about itself. I guess since then Google worked on their “Rich Snippets” system. But what about schema.org in WordPress? Is it possible to integrated it there?

What the hell are Rich Snippets?

Earlier before (on May 2009), Google announced that they would be parsing microdata for using them in search results to display useful things directly to the user. They called it “Rich Snippets”. Here is an example of a star rating that you may have seen before on Google:

Rich Snippet Star Rating Example

Why not using hcard, RDFa or other microformats?

There are a lot of microformat-standards out there, that’s right. But Google explicitly wrote on their Webmaster Tools Support Sites that they decided to focus on schema.org in the future. The thing is that it can be attached to nearly any element. Even “Facebooks Open Graph (…) doesn’t provide the detailed information search engines need to improve the user experience”, they wrote.

How does it look like?

The easiest example is the following one:

Normally (and typically on any WordPress page) a HTML page begins with something like this:

XHTML

1

2

3

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

(...)

But this doesn’t really explain what the page is for (or even what it does). When we add schema.org microdata it will look like this.

XHTML

1

2

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<!DOCTYPE html>

<html itemscope="itemscope"itemtype="http://schema.org/Blog">

(...)

This now tells the search engines even more. In this case: the current page is a blog! (Yes, there is a difference between a normal webpage and a blog page!).

What about Schema.org in WordPress?

Schema.org did not found its way to the WordPress community yet. They have added hcard information before but it seems very incomplete. That’s why a lot of WordPress installations generate the popular “Missing required field “entry-title”. Warning: Missing required field ‘updated'” or anything else on Googles Rich Snippet Testing Tool.

By the way: this is also the reason why rich snippet do not work on those pages. If there is only one error Google will not show rich snippets on search results for those pages.

Therefore, we should not rely on hcard information that has been integrated in WordPress at this point. As I found out, Google rely on schema.org in the future. Instead you should use a theme which fully supports the schema.org microdata. For example the schema.org Corporate WordPress theme. It adds a lot of microdata to nearly every single HTML element on your blog.

Why not using any schema.org WordPress plugin?

The thing is that there are schema.org plugins out there (like the Rich Snippets WordPress plugin) but they cannot add schema.org to every single HTML element of your blog. By using this plugins you have to add Rich Snippets manually to every single page. Technically it’s just not possible that a plugin adds schema.org automatically.

In fact, WordPress themes has to do this for you. In the theme files you can specify things like the header-example from above.

Why should I markup?

“Search engines are using on-page markup in a variety of ways—for example, Google uses it to create rich snippets in search results. (…) over time you can expect that more data will be used in more ways. In addition, since the markup is publicly accessible from your web pages, other organizations may find interesting new ways to make use of it as well.”

More importantly, the use of Rich Snippets can make your web pages appear more prominently in search results, so you may see an increase in traffic. In my opinion it’s not only about the Rich Snippets that look really good on your search results. It’s also about the fact that search engines can learn more about the structure of your website which makes crawling more efficient.

I’m sure that in the near future, schema.org markup will be a fixed part of search engine optimization.

However, implementing this stuff is not that easy as it seems. Especially because it has something to do with coding. And we know that a lot of the wordpress-users do not really have any experiences in coding. And this is okay. That’s why we’re here.

So in this article I want to show you how you can implement Rich Snippets for WordPress yourself or by using one of our themes or plugins.

Alright. Let’s start with a simple example. We just want to add a rating to our current page. Continue reading →

Some of our plugins and themes do only work with the latest PHP version. In most cases it’s okay when at least PHP in version 7.0 is running on your webserver. According to Wikipedia the support of version 5.6 will reach “End-of-life” in December 2018. Therefore you should consider to update.

Unfortunately some of you will not have access to the server and the knowledge to update PHP. But, the good thing is, that PHP 7.0.0 is out for some years and it’s well supported by most webhosting providers.

So please ask your website provider how you can switch to a new version. A Google search will help in most cases.

On the following page I will introduce the world’s first schema.org WordPress Theme to you. Please sit down, relax and read carefully to understand what this theme can do for you and how it can improve your Click-through rate on search results. Continue reading →